Whether you use Wayland or not depends on what DE/Window Manager/Session Manager you are using and not what distro.
Cinnamon, XFCE don't really work with Wayland. Cinnamon just hangs on my system, and I don't believe XFCE even support. I am on Debian 13, so things may have changed on the latest versions.
Making Gnome using X was as simple as disabling Wayland. A one line change in GDM config somewhere and restart the session manager.
> This just feels like the systemd drama restarted. Some will complain and hold on to the past for as long as they can but the rest of the world moves on.
That because a similar things happen fairly regularly in Linux land. It seems every 5 years (or so it seems) There are things that are working perfectly fine, and then someone/some group decided that half of a particular stack needs rewriting/replacing at <large corp> and we go through a rigmarole of bugs, breakage, stability issues.
It isn't people being irrational. It is people not wanting to go through another 5 years of churn on their desktops. If people are happy with something that works fine in their opinion and it is replaced by something else that causes a lot of churn and it isn't substantially better a lot of people are going to be left pissed off about it and thus the drama and resentment.
This also causes issues for other operating systems e.g. BSDs/Solaris forks etc. Their users have to deal with all the Linuxisms.
> Wayland is the better choice today.
The problem is that a lot of stuff still doesn't work properly. I am using a modern AMD card. I get weird hang ups in Chrome/Brave that don't happen in X. Sometimes the windows "stick", other times the whole desktop just locks up. Doesn't happen in X at all. I am a web developer, so this is very annoying.
There is another problem and that is that I don't think Wayland even works on non-Linux *nix like FreeBSD.
The things that Gnome did well with Wayland is things like Different Refresh rates, display scaling etc. That all worked nicely. However the way Gnome works with Games can be a PITA.
When I was using Wayland BTW, I was using it with Gnome 48, GDM on Debian 13. I think they just released Gnome 50. I went to Cinnamon and can't really go back because I updated too many dependencies from back-ports to reinstall Gnome.